[aidos]

I, like most, hadn't even heard of Ruby before Rails. The two were synonymous - I remember having to explain to a number of people that should have know better that Ruby was a language and Rails was a framework.

I don't really know the history of Django but I'd wager it took a lot of inspiration from Rails.

Rails had that year's head-start on Django. By the time Django came along everyone was pretty deep into the development of Rails. I think it's mostly down to first mover advantage (it really did revolutionise web development).

In terms of frontend frameworks I have no idea what's going to happen.

Backbone definitely had the initial traction and it's nice and clean, but damn AngularJS makes development quick and easy. I've implemented things in the last couple of days in Angular that would have taken a week or more previously.

The Angular approach is unorthodox and seemingly inefficient but serves the developer well at the cost of CPU cycles.

Then again, I backed Prototype during the initial js lib battles and we know how that worked out.

[jimray]

> I don't really know the history of Django but I'd wager it took a lot of inspiration from Rails.

Not exactly. Django mainly came into existence as a formalization of a lot of helper functions that The Lawrence Journal-World newspaper found themselves building over and over again when they built web apps. Adrian Holovaty, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, and Simon Willison created Django separately from Rails, even if it wasn't released publicly for a while (and then got kinda stuck at 0.96 for a while after that).

It's like Newton and Leibniz with calculus or Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace with natural selection; there were a lot of similar problems to be solved in the web dev space in the early '00's, particularly around accessing databases, structuring URLs, and handling authentication, it makes sense that a few similar approaches would show up around the same time.

If you're really interested in the history, this "Snakes and Rubies" video is worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb9KDt9aXc8

(I should mention that I tend to personally prefer Python to Ruby, very much like Django, consider Adrian Holovaty a friend and we both once worked at msnbc.com at the same time.)

[aidos]

Ah, thanks for the info - need to learn my history a bit better.

My point still stands, I think that by the time Django made it out into the world Rails was already established as the dominant framework. Django 0.96 hadn't been as thoroughly thrashed as Rails and definitely had the warts to prove it.

Django is a much more mature beast these days, though I still lean more towards Flask if there's a choice to be made.

[simonw]

That's a good summary. I answered a question on Quora about this which goes in to a bit more detail: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-the-Django-web-f...

[creamyhorror]

> It's like Newton and Leibniz with calculus or Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace with natural selection; there were a lot of similar problems to be solved in the web dev space in the early '00's, particularly around accessing databases, structuring URLs, and handling authentication, it makes sense that a few similar approaches would show up around the same time.

And can you imagine, they could have patented each and every one of those solutions, and spurred their competitors to greater innovation! What a surprise that they didn't - how silly of them. /s